What’s so wrong with Reid’s bill?

posted at 2:45 pm on July 29, 2011 by Tina Korbe

House Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling-and-deficit-reduction bill, now through Revision Round 2 and headed for likely passage, has hogged most media attention over the past few days, but, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now touting his bill as “the only compromise there is,” the lesser-known parts of Reid’s proposal deserve a little bit of attention.

First and most importantly, the bill actually explicitly seeks to excuse the Senate from passing a budget resolution for the next two years. Reid and Senate Democrats have enjoyed a more-than-800-day vacation from crafting a budget in the first place, but that’s just not enough – never mind that the law requires the Senate to pass a budget every year. So, how does the Reid plan enable the Senate to skirt its responsibility even further? It “deems” a budget for this year and next year.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) explained today on the Senate floor just what this means:

The Reid amendment to increase the debt limit deems two consecutive budget resolutions for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. In other words, it basically takes over the budget process and sets the basic spending number. Does the president think the Senate should go two more years without crafting or passing a budget? We’ve already gone two. The Reid amendment sets spending allocations for most Senate committees at the Congressional Budget Office’s rising baseline. … So it just says we’re going to deem the amount we spend, what C.B.O. has projected our growth and spending to be. And C.B.O. projects growth in spending. They don’t set that as right for America, but they project that’s what will occur under current circumstances. … So without hearings or debate on these allocations, this provision would provide a further excuse for avoiding a budget and increase the likelihood … the Congressional Budget Act will be violated for the third straight year. This is an abrogation of the responsibilities of the Senate and of the Budget Committee of the United States Senate. We were not elected to the Senate and chosen to serve on the Committee on the Budget … to see most of the budget levels automatically raised based on a set of spending growth projections by some apparachix in the C.B.O.

Sessions is right. It is an abrogation of responsibility — and one that’s been little remarked upon in discussion of Reid’s amendment.

Next, Reid’s bill boasts the largest debt increase in U.S. history — $2.7 trillion. Up to now, the most sizable increase has been $1.9 trillion (also an Obama increase). Debt ceiling increases might be routine — but hikes of this magnitude are not. Far better — and, frankly, more in line with precedent — to split that increase into two “smaller” amounts (even split in half, the increase is monstrous!).

Finally, as has been repeatedly pointed out, the savings in Reid’s bill aren’t exactly real. Reid touts dollar-for-dollar savings, but that’s a ruse. The bill actually delivers just $1 trillion in cuts in exchange for that unprecedented $2.7 trillion increase. The Global War on Terror savings are a gimmick. The administration has never requested current levels of funding for the war for the next ten years (i.e. the administration has never planned to spend $160 billion each year on the war for the next 10 years). Not funding what the administration was never going to fund doesn’t qualify as a cut.

Yet, Reid still claims his bill represents a compromise, whereas Boehner’s bill does not. Here he is today, making it sound as though he’s doing a favor to moderate Republicans who recoil from the lack of compromise Boehner has put forth:

Right now, this is the only compromise there is. … What is being done in the House is not a compromise. It’s being jammed through there with all kinds of non-transparent dealings. We’re recognizing the only compromise there is, is mine. Ours is truly a bipartisan piece of legislation. Republicans realize that. I’ve had a number of Republicans come to me. I had one Republican come to me and say, “Thank you” for your legislation. … I’ve asked my friend Sen. McConnell to meet with me and try to work this out. … The stakes couldn’t be higher. The security of our nation, every family, is at stake here. If the debt ceiling is not increased, every American family will feel an increase in their taxes, all their payments, credit cards, loans that they’ve taken out for their children to go to college, car payments, mortgages on their houses. So I say here to my Republican colleagues in the Senate to put the American people first. … The people we all represent want us to come together.

But what does the bill offer that Republicans want? Equivalent cuts? No. Enforceable future cuts? No. A vote on a balanced budget amendment? Certainly not.

Why aren’t House Republicans writing Reid a letter to say they won’t support his bill if it makes it to the House? Why isn’t Boehner saying it’s DOA?

Blowback

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First and most importantly, the bill actually explicitly seeks to excuse the Senate from passing a budget resolution for the next two years. Reid and Senate Democrats have enjoyed a more-than-800-day vacation from crafting a budget in the first place, but that’s just not enough – never mind that the law requires the Senate to pass a budget every year. So, how does the Reid plan enable the Senate to skirt its responsibility even further? It “deems” a budget for this year and next year.

THIS is what Boehner and the GOP need to be screaming from the rafters. THIS is why BBA is off the table. Those cowards don’t want their names attached to a vote ahead of their elections. CALL THEM ON IT.

Hopefully Reid’s bill will be on Hannity and Rush and all the other conservative channels. Hopefully Boehner will make a mockery of it on the news. Hopefully this will never see the light of day and be DOA when it arrives at the House.

Hopefully the Republicans grow a spine and don’t let this travesty through.

So, if you take the starting position to be not increasing the debit ceiling (which I suppose would add up to tens of trillions of dollars in cuts over the next decade), even CCB looks more like a purely Democrat bill than a compromise. To be an actual compromise, the cuts are going to have to be in the double diggets of trillions.

El Rushbo was just discussing the obscene and failed little Bammie stimulus, and the fact that that amount of money, $800B or so, is now in the baseline. That means going forward it is a given that additional money is in the budget. That demonstrates what is wrong with DC.

Many of the 20-plus Democrats up for reelection next year, despite belonging to a party that insists on raising taxes now, would rather not run on that record. And because Reid’s plan would set revenue levels according to the Congressional Budget Office baseline, which follows current law (including the expiration of business tax extenders, the AMT patch, and the Bush tax rates), rather than current policy, it effectively assumes a tax increase of about $3.5 trillion over ten years. So they get their tax increase, but without having to actually vote on it.

El Rushbo was just discussing the obscene and failed little Bammie stimulus, and the fact that that amount of money, $800B or so, is now in the baseline. That means going forward it is a given that additional money is in the budget. That demonstrates what is wrong with DC.

Well, at least he’s not as bad as that turncoat b@$tard Allen West. /
catmman on July 29, 2011 at 2:54 PM
West supports him and his bill. Birds of a feather.
keep the change on July 29, 2011 at 2:59 PM

Come on- Reid’s bill will never pass the House. Boehner doesn’t need to come out and say that. House Republicans don’t need to write a silly little letter to say that. We’ve all seen how stupid this made the Democrats look over the last few days; do we want to join them?

IF Dingy can get it through the Senate, the House GOP members can talk with their voting button. They’ll vote no and that’s all they’ve got to say.

El Rushbo was just discussing the obscene and failed little Bammie stimulus, and the fact that that amount of money, $800B or so, is now in the baseline. That means going forward it is a given that additional money is in the budget. That demonstrates what is wrong with DC.

This all comes down to who gets blamed. I don’t think either bill will make through the opposite house. So, we’re right back where we were weeks ago. So, if we don’t raise the debt-ceiling and people start to feel it in their wallets, who gets held responsible?

I think Democrats, simply because the facts aren’t on their side. They can’t say and no one can provide evidence that Reid’s bill does anything like what he claims. Democrats don’t like the GOP bill because they’re Democrats. The public can make that distinction.

I’m either going to check out of politics for the next 20 years or only vote for truly fiscal conservative/tea party people. If that means Dems win, so be it. The House had CCB bill which should have been their starting negotiating point. Instead, they allowed Reid and the Senate to make them negotiate amongst themselves and now this new Boenher watered down bill is where we start negotiating with Reid, which means we’ll end up with an even more watered down, useless piece of crap bill that will do nothing. And RINO’s will say…hey, at least they didn’t raise taxes and claim it a victory for the Republican party.
I am just sooooo tired. Leaning towards checking out. Too many people worried about their job and not the future of this country.

Whatever. We’re just as fiscally screwed with the Boehner plan as we are with the Reid plan. Until entitlements are dealt with, we’re arguing over whether we should use a coffee cup or wine glass to bail water out of a sinking battleship.

Why aren’t House Republicans writing Reid a letter to say they won’t support his bill if it makes it to the House? Why isn’t Boehner saying it’s DOA?

Because it isn’t. there are 25 GOPers who will vote for anything that doesn’t raise taxes.

I’ve always said dems like to live in an ideal world whereas the gop lives in a world that involves choices. Take Medicare. The choices are to fix it or have it go away. Those are the choices. No matter how much the dems would love to just do nothing and have medicare be OK, that’s not a choice.

Well here we are. The choices are Reid’s bill and Boehner’s (original) bill. Those are the choices. No matter how much you’d like CCB to be a choice, it’s not. I don’t get how the hold-outs can’t grasp this.

“Right now the extremists have locked down this Congress,” Reid continued. “We’re doing nothing. The extremists have locked down the White House. They’re not able to do their work. The country is in an economic malaise and they want to keep this up.”

Pardon us all to HELL for occasionally noticing the LAW – don’t ALL spending bills have to originate in the House?

Katfish on July 29, 2011 at 3:40 PM

Amen, brother! Republicans hold the purse strings, yet all we hear is whining about how they only control one half of one third of the government. Even though that’s true we control the part where spending originates. And we won in a landslide last November. Let them compromise with us, dammit. If we can’t fight for what we believe in now, when, pray tell, will it be that we DO fight?

Why aren’t House Republicans writing Reid a letter to say they won’t support his bill if it makes it to the House? Why isn’t Boehner saying it’s DOA?

1. They’re spineless cretins, more interested in continued high life and big spending in D.C.;

2. Because “reasonable” Republicans, like Ed Morrissey, the tea-sipping wimps at NRO and damn near two-thirds of the posters at HA, have been yammering about “it’s the best we can do, folks.”

So Reid naturally grabs for all he can and more. No one will stop him, unless someone grows a pair and stands up to the Traitor-in-Chief and his thieving Congressional enablers.

Whoever said “Double the CCB and send it back to the Senate” has it right. We can no longer afford the pantywaist political games. Time to go Charles Bronson (metaphorically, of course) on these jerks.

Why aren’t House Republicans writing Reid a letter to say they won’t support his bill if it makes it to the House? Why isn’t Boehner saying it’s DOA?

Because that is the deal that Boehner, Reid & Obama have had in place since before the CCB was passed in the House & they need the Reid plan to complete it….

Part 1 – Agree to extend the debt ceiling past 2012 while only reducing the rate of growth of the government by less then 0.1%…

Part 2 – Show vote on CCB to get as many Tea Partiers to vote for what comes after CCB vote… Done – 07/19/11

Part 3 – Pass water down Boehner Bill in House first to lock down Tea Pariers that vote yes on it… Done – 07/29/11 (They didn’t think that it would take them 10 days to do it…)

Part 4 – Pass even more water down & smoke and mirrors Reid bill in Senate… Will be done by tomorrow since RINO’s are a thriving species in the Senate…

Part 5 – Merge both bills giving Obama his past 2012 bottom line & throwing scraps to so call fiscal hawks by reducing the rate of growth by 0.01% & 0% on real dollars…

Part 6 – The press will sell this as a great Republican victory… On how they force Obama to sign what he wanted in the first place(Taking the crazy spending off the table for 2012 & signing something that will make him say he lower “spending”)…

Not raising taxes while leaving the rate of growth untouched all of sudden equals success…

Congrats… RinoPublicans get to pat themselves on the back for giving the government 2.7 Trillian extra credit line but not a penny more… They mean it this time…